Archive for the 'Feminism' Category

Last night, at a cozy and welcoming Italian restaurant on the Upper West Side, my husband and I celebrated our two year anniversary. Surrounded by the wealthy, yet understated, quintessential UWS intellectuals, while my hubby wore his new button-down and I had my hair done all nice, we noticed just one little sore thumb at the corner table across the room: a man coming close to 80 dining with a woman coming close to her next paycheck.

The woman, a very attractive Asian in her thirties, wore an amount of make-up suitable only for the Miss America pageant, and a strapless knee-length floral dress (inappropriate for the 40-degree Fahrenheit outside, and frankly, for the UWS in general). Her long flowing black hair neared her lower back, and was perfectly curled at the bottom. This woman did not just “throw on any old thing”. This took effort. This took practice.

My hubby said, “She’s a gold digger”. This woman seemed incredibly capable at pleasant conversation, as she exhibited sincere interest in the elderly man, and seemed to be engaging his interest as well. She was good at this. She did not look like a woman who was trying to find a rich man to take care of her. This woman did this for a living.

“No”, I said. “She’s a call girl.” I did a little borderline offensive, stereotyping, psychological evaluation of her, and deduced that she was incredibly bright, but decided to use her intelligence for the world’s oldest profession, instead of the standard Upper West Side non-profit/professional/medical/legal/democratic-minded/Masters-degree-or-higher-necessary career. My hubby said, “Maybe she went to an IVY League, but had “Daddy issues” and decided to become a call girl. There are plenty of girls who work their way through top colleges by stripping”.

“Stripping is not the same thing as being a call girl.”

“No, but it’s the same path” he said.

“Yeah, no,” I said, judging purely on looks. This woman is not working her way through Columbia Law School.”.

I looked at this sore-thumb couple in the corner of this family establishment and thought, “Good for them”. She’s making a living for herself and he’s got the money to spend on good company. Sure, she may have to do the sumthin’-sumthin’ with the old dude, but girl was making a living. And sure, he’s gotta pay for a woman who looks like that to spend the evening with him, but at least he can pay for it, right?

I’m not one to condone sex for money (nor those who pay for it), but they looked happy. They were both getting what they wanted. And even if she was a gold digger, and not a call girl, it seemed as though she was on her way to a jackpot (hey, at least she got dinner).

On an episode of The Man Show, Adam and Jimmy set up a table outdoors with a sign that read, “Help End Women’s Suffrage”, asking people to sign the petition to stop the needless suffraging all over the world. Far too many intelligent-looking women signed the thing. Women for whom the fight for their right to vote was won don’t even understand it enough as they sign something condemning it. And as funny as that concept is, how sad the irony was in the end.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg did an interview yesterday at The Women’s Conference in Long Beach, CA, where she spoke about the change in women’s standing in society over the last 150 years, or so. You might think, “Ah, she must have spoken about how great it is that women have so much more say in government now, not to mention the fact that the Supreme Court, and all lower courts, were filled almost entirely with white males up until just two or three decades ago!” Well, yes, I guess she said that too. But she also pointed out the difference between her appointment and that of her two fellow female colleagues, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. In 1993, when Ginsburg was appointed, she won 96 votes out of the 100 member Senate. She said that had she been nominated today, she would have had a very, very difficult time being voted in. The point that I got from her comments on the subject was that the Senate is less inclusive with women now, and more nit-picky with who they let in. What does that say about the direction in which feminism (and our society, for that matter) is going?

Ginsburg won with 96 votes, Sotomayor with 68, and Kagan with 63. Ginsburg implied that Kagan should have been far more of a shoe-in than Ginsburg herself was, due to her controversial close relationship with the ACLU. Do these numbers flatter Ginsburg, or do they speak poorly of Kagan? What if they say neither, but instead say that because there was only one woman in the Supreme Court when Ginsburg was appointed that everyone just wanted to let her in, because it was the politically correct thing to do? And when Kagan was appointed, they removed the pc-colored glasses and saw her as a racist lesbian?

Curiouser and curiouser…

Honestly, I didn’t mean to write about all this when I thought of this topic. What I really wanted to talk about was how so many women are so horribly insecure. It seems like such a huge waste of time to be so uncomfortable/fearful/unsure of oneself when life can be so short. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not exactly a stronghold of emotional fortitude. But the amount of times lately I’ve heard someone say about a woman, “Oh she does that because she’s insecure”, or I find myself forgiving a woman of [really lame] behavior by thinking, “It’s because she’s insecure” does not bode well for today’s modern woman. This is not to say that getting the right to vote means that women should never be insecure, but what’s the point in having the government believe in your opinions enough to let you vote when you don’t even believe in yourself? (Or worse, you believe in yourself, but you’re so afraid of other people’s opinions that you spend all your time trying to prove to them what you’re worth). Anyway, I’m sure this would constitute an entire blog site of its own. I’d probably call it “Why are so Many Women so Damn Broken – and Other Such Stories” (Again, I’m not exactly excluding myself from this definition either).

So what does the insecurity of women have anything to do with that episode of The Man Show or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comments? In a nut shell? Every day, women are expressing through their daily actions what Ruth Bader Ginsburg is pointing out about the backlash of women’s rights, which Adam and Jimmy are demonstrating with on-camera proof of the lack of follow-through women have had since getting the right to vote nine decades ago.

My advice to solve all problems with sexism, the weakness of feminism, and the regression of women’s standing in society (since you asked for it):

Watch more Cosby Show, and less porn.

Watch more theater, and less TV.

Watch out for B*tch Magazine in the bookstore (oh it’s such a delicious feminist journalistic treat)

Watch more BBC World News, and less CNN/Fox (just because).

And watch out for what your little sisters and daughters are learning today, and do what you can to encourage them to feel more secure.